Performance

The earphones were tested on my regular portable rig which consists of a Cowon D2 and a RSA Tomahawk. All the material was FLAC encoded and all sound enhancement features including equalizer were turned off at all times. Before I began my listening tests I gave the earphones 100 hours of burn-in time which should be more than enough to get the drivers to sound their best. The iM-590 performed really good considering their price. The balance between mids, highs and lows was alright, however, the low and high end extension is not quite as good as that of more expensive earphones.

The midrange is really good, it is not overly dominant and has an impressive amount of definition considering the price of the in-ears. The bass is likewise good. Although it does not extended that far, it is well defined and fast, plus amount wise it is where it needs to be. These earphones sound well with lots of different material straight from Hip Hop to House, Trance, and Rock. The tonal balance means that they are good at most type of contemporary music. To my ears they do not have the high end definition in order to do well with Classical, neither the timbre to portray the instruments delicately enough.

One of the pitfalls sound wise that Maximo has not succeeded to steer clear off is sibilance. The iM-590s suffer from quite a bit of sibilance or overly prominent high midrange. The amount is borderline painful on poorly mastered tracks, and makes them a bit less comfortable to listen to for an extended period of time. Other than that only the high end is a bit disappointing, or rather as good as you would expect for a set of $59 in-ears. Overall the iM-590 consequently perform better than what you would expect for a set of $59 in-ears except for the few minor errors sound wise.

Microphonic noise is the real deal killer here. The braided cable is incredibly annoying to listen to. No matter how I placed the cable the ever so annoying noise from the cable was unbearable which is a real shame, because the earphones sound so nice. For a product intended for use on the move this problem is unacceptable and it seems that most in-ear manufacturers have learned this, but Maximo insists on annoying their customers with braided cables.

Sometimes small things escape even the most eagleeyed reviewer. It seems that Maximo made a decent effort to reduce unwanted microphonic noise by allowing the rubber y-spilt adjuster to hook up to the shirt clip.



This little "cable clip"-trick can alleviate most of the symptoms if you hook it up to the y-split adjuster. This way the microphonic noise from the majority of the cable gets dampened a lot and the rubbing noise is completely gone from the device up to the split. All in all this makes the dampening much more efficient. The Maximo in-ears are still not the quietest of the bunch, but way better than what I found in my initial conclusion. I had the shit clip hooked up to the cable just below the split for all my testing, but with the clip moved up and hooked on to the rubber adjuster the microphonic annoyance was not nearly as dominant.